AI Day at ASU 2025

Inspired fireside chat from President Michael Crow and Danielle McNamara, Executive Director and Professor, Learning Engineering Institute

Don’t miss this thought-provoking conversation between Michael M. Crow, President of ASU and visionary higher-ed leader, and Danielle McNamara, Executive Director of the Learning Engineering Institute and global expert in AI and learning sciences. Together, they’ll explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping education, from intelligent tutoring systems to the future of learning at scale.

Experience the Principled Innovation Discovery Game

Step into an interactive experience that puts character and values at the heart of decision-making. The Principled Innovation Discovery Game challenges teams and individuals to reflect, discuss, and explore how ethical choices shape teaching, learning, and technology. Through engaging prompts and collaborative dialogue, participants will discover fresh, innovative approaches to problem-solving while strengthening a culture of integrity and impact.

Dive Into Breakout Sessions

• AlumnAI: Magical engagement at scale - Presented by ASU Enterprise Partners, this session explores how AI—through LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agentic systems—is transforming alumni engagement. Learn how we’re extracting insights from thousands of alumni stories, building a multilingual Copilot agent to support scalable and secure alumni services and exploring future applications of RAG. Join us to discover how purposeful AI can unlock new possibilities for connection, efficiency and impact. 

   

    Location: Alumni Room

   

• Come Play on the AI Playground! - This hands-on BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) workshop is designed for college educators, decision-makers, teachers, and students to explore AI Applications, programs, strategies, and resources to integrate AI. During this workshop, we will debut an interactive AI hub, The AI Playground, specifically crafted and dedicated to the educational community, including college faculty, K-12 educators, and learners of all levels. The hub is curated with eleven categories of AI apps and programs designed to simplify the exploration of AI, making it accessible and engaging for educators and students. In addition, we have designed the playground to empower participants with the knowledge and skills needed to seamlessly integrate AI into the educational process, thereby enhancing teaching methodologies, enriching curriculum resources, facilitating research, and streamlining administrative tasks. During our hands-on session, we will play on the AI Playground with apps and programs, design and discuss integration strategies, and showcase AI's potential to revolutionize educational practices. Come and learn about AI on The AI Playground. 

   

   

    Location: Gold Room

• Creating the Future of Higher Education: AI & the New Economy of Trust -  This session explores how AI can move beyond optimizing the work of individual students or instructors and instead transform the broader contexts in which higher education takes place. We examine how trust sits at the center of transformative learning experiences, and how design choices in AI can strengthen or erode that trust. We present a framework for using AI agents as classroom partners that listen, prompt student reflection, and give instructors real-time insight into the student experience. Alongside this framework, we share prototypes of AI-embedded assignments and classroom tools that make communication more direct, build connection, and let instructors adjust to their student’s learning experiences. By rethinking AI as a platform for trust and collaboration, we sketch a vision of higher education where students and instructors co-create dynamic, responsive, human-centered environments where the learning process is not just better managed and but more deeply understood.

   

    Location: Pima Room

   

• From Prompt to Play: Building Games with AI in Real Time - See how an entire game can be created using only AI prompts. This live session will walk through art, design, and programming generated by AI, offering a glimpse into the future of rapid, creative game development. 

   

    Location: Turquoise Room

• The Ethos of Artificial Intelligence - Who is Grok? What about ChatGPT? What is their character, and do you trust them? In this session, I offer an applied humanities perspective regarding the ethos of artificial intelligence. Drawing from human-machine communication, I’ll discuss what it means to communicate with artificial intelligence, how we can understand its character, and the consequences of forming relationships with chatbots. 

   

    Location: Cochise Room

• The Learning Stack: Recommendations, Accessible Transcripts, and AI-Driven Feedback - See three AI building blocks in action: a recommendation engine that personalizes, a transcript-to-accessible-HTML pipeline for any device, and a grader that uses multimodal (image + text) analysis to generate rubric-aligned feedback. Walk away with practical patterns you can apply immediately. 

   

    Location: La Paz